In the film's beginning, at a sparsely attended hockey game a woman yells at a French-Canadian player, "frog pussy!" The viewer would then know that the movie will be profanity-laced and downright raunchy. Paul Newman stars as aging veteran player-coach Reggie Dunlop of the Charlestown Chiefs, a Pennsylvania minor league hockey team on a losing streak. That is, until the participants begin to play with extreme fierceness with the addition of three Hanson Brothers, who wear thick eyeglasses and who play rough and tough. They can certainly skate. Brawls abound as the fans cheer, and Dunlop approves of all this. With the dirty tactics, the Chiefs start to win right and make the playoffs. They sell out games. Then there is the irony that I will not disclose here. Meanwhile the local mill will soon be closing, and without support the team will also fold. It looks like the last season. As Dunlop incorrectly believes that the team will be sold to a Florida interest, he plants a story in the local newspaper. The story has several subplots. Paul Newman is in his element. In fact, he stated that he had more fun making this movie than any other. He's fun to watch as usual, but his heated discussion with the team owner near the end is over the top. Strother Martin plays crafty old-timer General Manager Joe McGrath. Andrew Duncan is madcap sportscaster Jim Carr. In a minor role, Melinda Dillon as Suzanne displays her lovely boobs for us to see. Brooding Ned Braden is played by Canadian Michael Ontkean, who disapproves of the rowdy play. He wants to make it to the National Hockey League (NHL). Lindsay Crouse as Lily is Ned's long-suffering wife. Screenplay is by Nancy Dowd, whose brother Ned Dowd was a minor league hockey player who made it for a short time to the WHA (World Hockey Association), which rivaled the NHL for a few years. Ned Dowd himself plays brutish Ogilthorpe. By the way, the hockey team really is the old Johnstown Jets of the North American Hockey League (and before that the East Coast Hockey league), as the ending credits thank them specifically. They actually won their league championship in 1975. The movie, filmed before helmets were mandatory, was filmed in New York and Pennsylvania. Maxine Nightingale sings "Right Back Where We Started From," a fitting ending.

It is so much better in plain old French joual. So funny! The Hanson brothers are worth the watch.

"Gay men are guardians of the masculine impulse. What is anonymous sex in a dark alleyway but a homage to male freedom?" ― Camille PagliaRelease "Slap Shot" in any other decade and it would feel like a vulgar comedy cynically put together by a marketing committee. Release in the 1970s, though, and it'll feels like some kind of social statement. With F bombs.Directed by George Roy Hill, "Slap Shot" stars Paul Newman as Reggie Dunlop, an ageing hockey coach based in the steel town of Charlestown. With the closing of local steel mills, money has become scarce. To make matters worse, the owners of the Charlestown Chiefs, Reggie's team, are thinking of liquidating the club. Reggie's plan, to keep his team and his boys marketable, is to resort to violent sensationalism. He re-brands the Chiefs into a band of barbarians on ice. The public love it.Despite being set in the macho world of sports, "Slap Shot" was written by a woman, Nancy Dowd. She has the film develop two parallel strands. One focuses on various women who find men to be emasculated, boorish and immature. These women, most of whom reject traditional femininity and are perpetually dressed in dour clothes, are unfulfilled by men and even go so far as to turn to lesbian relationships. The men put up with this. The times are changing, they rationalise.The other half of the film deals with the arena of sport being appropriated and perverted by Big Business. Whores in skates, our band of foul-mouthed performers cater to the baser impulses of spectators. Always playing with toys, and childishly homophobic, they're also incapable of mature relationships with women. There's an infantalizing and emasculating quality to both sport and business, Dowd argues, our heroes essentially castrated and so feminized, regardless of their foul mouthed, macho tirades. Dowd's women, meanwhile, are masculinized, made courser, more cynical and harder by the market. Indeed, it is Reggie who insists upon turning women "back into women", taking them to beauty parlours in an attempt to restore old modes of masculinity and femininity.Reggie is further shocked when he confronts the fact that the Charlestown Chiefs are owned by a svelte businesswoman, a woman who has so little regard for the bloodsport that hockey has become, that she refuses to let her own children watch games. Reggie fumes. He's deemed a pathetic product by the very people who profit from his antics.The film ends with a Princeton educated player, Ned Braden (Michael Ontkean), staging a little protest. Throughout the film, Braden refuses to sell-out for the sake of the box office; he refuses to fight. During the film's climactic game, Braden then goes further and stages a strip-routine. "Make him stop! That's disgusting," rivals yell. The act not only makes a mockery of boardroom and bleacher violence, but the machismo of audiences, owners and players, all of whom deem violence less obscene than innocence and nudity. Ironically, Braden's wife, for the first time in the film, is here given feminine clothes, and it is an act of violence committed by the oppositional team which swiftly leads to the now-pacifist Chiefs winning their final game.The 1970s saw a number of gritty, foul-mouthed sports movies ("The Longest Yard", "Bad News Bears" etc). "Slap Shot" was one of the last in this wave. Interestingly, Hill has the film end with a husband and wife splitting. She's a successful businesswoman who skips town, he's left alone in the rubble of Charlestown. The film's signature song is Maxine Nightingale's "Right Back Where We Started From", the song's lyrics ("it's alright, and it's coming along, we got to get right back to where we started from") perhaps speaking, amongst other things, to a masculinity which dreams of one day reasserting itself.7.9/10 – See "Bull Durham". Worth two viewings.

A minor league hockey team tries to salvage its losing season while dealing with the possibility of being sold. It is not clear what this film is meant to be. It's advertised as a comedy, but there's hardly anything funny here. There are endless scenes of home and road games that do little to propel the narrative. Newman is the player-coach, although he's too old to be playing and is not shown doing any coaching. The characters are undeveloped and uninteresting. This is inexplicably regarded as one of the best sports films. Director Hill is reunited with Newman, but the magic of "Butch Cassidy" and "The Sting" is missing here; perhaps if Robert Redford played Newman's teammate...